Setting off to row 2,700 nautical miles across the Pacific in a four-woman boat, raising funds and awareness of a project to help save the seas from plastic and hoping to break a world record at the same time might seem like enough of a challenge for anyone.

However, for Burnham-on-Crouch's own 'Ocean Sheroes' - a team of four women, two in their forties and two in their twenties – this challenge is about more than just the enormous task they've set themselves.

Bella Collins, 28, who has grown up in Burnham-on-Crouch and took her first sailing steps from the town's waterfront, explains: "We want to show all women – and men – that you can overcome issues of self-esteem and doubt to achieve any challenge you set yourself.

"We all have full-time jobs and we want to inspire other women and men to set out to achieve their goals, to find themselves and be what they want to be."

The four women - Bella, Lily Lower, also in her twenties, Mary Sutherland and Purusha Gordon - known as 'P' - are also rowing to raise funds for the Seabin Project.

The Seabin Project is renowned for their Seabins which collect waste from marina ports. The project also takes part in preventative activities including community activation, education programmes, data collection and scientific research.

Ultimately, the Seabin Project aims to promote a world where there isn't a need for Seabins at all. The team hopes to raise £60,000 for the project through the race.

Bella, Lily and Mary all come from Burnham and joined up with Purusha, who lives in London, after she met Charlie Pitcher, founder of Burnham-based Rannoch Adventure, after an ocean rowing race at Hawaii.

Charlie connected Purusha with the others and they eventually decided to take on the ocean rowing race challenge together.

The event will start in May at San Francisco, with the team rowing out through the famous Golden Gate Bridge into the Pacific and on to Hawaii.

It has taken them two years to prepare for the race and on 12 February they packed off their boat, Fenris, to be shipped to San Francisco in readiness for the race. Fenris, designed and built by Charlie Pitcher and Rannoch Adventure, is not a new boat – as Bella explains, it is re-conditioned.

"Rannoch Adventure helped us get Fenris ready," she says, "it's a perfectly good boat and we didn't want to needlessly create a new one, but to re-use one and make the most of it."

The race has only ever been completed by two all-women teams before and to beat the world record the Oceansheros will need to reach the finish line in less than 50 days, eight hours and 15 minutes.

Bella completed a 2016 row across the Atlantic, but she knows nothing can be taken for granted in the challenge ahead. The training schedule has been made tougher by the pandemic, which Bella says "has been a huge curve ball every single month".

She adds: "But what it has done is taught us about resilience."

Between lockdown, the team was able to train on the River Crouch and outside that there has been much solitary gym training, too.

And, Bella adds, the women make for a great team: "We're all very much individual characters and all different, but Lily and I are a bit like goody two shoes and do everything by the book, while Purusha and Mary push the limits a bit more.

"It works very well as we generally end up making decisions somewhere in the middle."

To find out more about the team's challenge or to donate to their Seabin Project cause you can visit the Ocean Sheroes website here.